When you hear the term, adventure game, you are most likely thinking of the genre of computer games and other video game system games that are defined with exploration, solving mysteries and narrative challenges. The adventure game has had a long history dating back to the existence of video games and has been widely viewed as the most popular games on the market. While most adventure games have been on the computer, there is still a large amount (and growing) of adventure games on consoles. Let’s look at the history of how these games came about and where they are headed!

The adventure game first originated with the work of computer programmer William Crowther. Crowther developed a game called Colossal Cave Adventure which was based on his heavy passion for caving. The game quickly gained popularity from the earliest computer savvy people and created a pretty devout following in the 1970’s. Crowther used a text interface in order to make the game interactive and graphic as far as the cave views. As the first adventure game, and one of the first video games period, Colossal Cave Adventure set the stage. Crowther’s game was appealing because of the cave descriptions and underground graphics. This game set the stage for the adventure games of today. 

One of the Colossal Cave Adventure’s biggest fans was another computer programmer, Scott Adams. Adams enjoyed the game so much that he quickly became a “Grand Master” (or the highest rating the game had to offer) in only 10 days. Because Adams was so intrigued with the adventure game he started fiddling around with how to make the game available on a home computer, which didn’t have as much memory power as a normal computer at the time. Although Adams couldn’t figure this out, in the process he figured out how to make more adventure games through dividing the game’s codes and language interpreters.

Adams went on to design twelve more adventure games and headed a company called Adventure International, which was a company dedicated to bringing out games like the original Colossal Cave Adventure.

Adventure games today have far surpassed those early days of trial and error designing and poor, crude graphics. While Crowther and Adams are seen as the pioneers of the adventure game industry, their work is pale in comparison to the games that are on the market today. Three-dimensional graphics and motion detected controls are all the rage as games become more and more realistic. However, without Crowther and Adam’s expertise in the matter, the game industry would not have taken off as it did.  Today the biggest adventure games are: Gabriel Knight, Space Quest, Myst, Broken Sword and King’s Quest.

The history of the games is clear and the graphics are now even clearer. With an uncountable amount of games under this genre nowadays it is easy to forget the humble beginnings that they arose from.